1. What are the projects and documentation available ?

If you're interested in help packaging Python itself, there's pkg-python but if you want to help with the Python modules or packaging a new one, you should look at Debian Python Modules Team project. Both groups discuss its activities in the same debian-python@l.d.o mailing list.

1.1. python-modules

2. Multiple python versions support

Debian supports several versions of Python simultaneously. Some packages include modules only for the default version, while others provide modules for all available. These are generally all provided within a single binary package, although in the past multiple packages were sometimes used.

The general trend is to reduce that diversity and provide modules for all Python versions available within Debian using the following guidelines.

2.1. Build dependencies

For compiled modules you need to depend on python-all-dev, and python-all-dbg. For Python-only modules the sole python-all is sufficient if they use Python-based build system (like the very used distutils). A helper such as dh_python2 (or the deprecated python-support and python-central) will automagically manage bytecompilation.

3. Note on bytecompilation for pure Python modules

As the helpers manage late-bytecompilation, no .pyc/.pyo files shall be shipped in your package. You do no need to spend build time for generating them. With distutils use the "--no-compile -O0" options; dh and the python CDBS classes know how to handle this. Beware some upstream sources that contain a setup.cfg which override your build options (see 360848), then you will have to patch it. In all cases, dh_python2 or python-support will remove those files if they are generated.

3.1. What are dh_python2 and dh_python3?

dh_python{2,3} are the python helpers included in the python package since 2.6.6-3.

dh_python2 differs from python-support, in including the per-python-version symlink farm within the binary package, only requiring byte-compilation at install time. Packages using dh_python2 with public modules must be rebuilt when Debian changes the supported Python versions (this should never happen after 2.7).

They can also guess dependencies from requires.txt, for setuptools/distutils packages.

3.2. What is python-support?

Python-support is a (now deprecated) tool to handle byte-compilation of python modules when there are several python versions installed on the system.

See /usr/share/doc/python-support/README.gz or SVN README for up-to-date information.

3.3. What is python-central?

Python-central is a (now deprecated) package that contains some helper scripts for building and installing python modules independent of the current installed Python version.

3.4. Should I use dh_pythonX, python-support or python-central?

dh_python2 is recommended for new Python 2 packages. dh_python3 is the only helper for Python3. python-support and python-central are deprecated.

Some statistics (the number of packages using each method - lower number is contrib), as of 2014-04-22:

~$ build-rdeps dh-python | grep total
Found a total of 283 reverse build-depend(s) for dh-python.
Found a total of 2 reverse build-depend(s) for dh-python.
~$ build-rdeps python-support | grep total
Found a total of 4 reverse build-depend(s) for python-support.
Found a total of 585 reverse build-depend(s) for python-support.

NB! Only python-support numbers are accurate, as other packages may build-depend indirectly on dh-python (for python3) or not use it at all (for python2)

4. Python eggs

4.1. What are Python eggs?

4.2. How should we package Python eggs?

We don't want to provide ".egg" files within the .deb. However we want to make the "egg meta-information" available so that users can use eggs if they so wish. Python >= 2.5 does that by default in distutils. For setuptools based setup.py you need to pass the option "--single-version-externally-managed" to the "setup.py install" call.

4.2.2. with CDBS and setuptools

5. Package naming

For binary packages of Python libraries, the Python Library Style Guide has some answers. For source package names, there is no consensus on whether they should be "foo" for a package named "foo" on the Python package index, or "python-foo".